Kael wandered the upper levels of Bastion Thorne, silent corridors echoing with the hum of distant machinery. A tactical briefing sat open on his HUD, lines of casualty data flickering in a lazy scroll across his vision. He dismissed it with a thought. Numbers were constant. Predictable. And today, they didn't matter.
His boots clicked softly on the polished alloy floor as he descended into the residential quarter—a place he rarely visited. It had been built for civilians, survivors who had been drawn in by the promise of food, safety, order. Peace, by his definition.
Children played in the courtyards between the fortified housing units. Their laughter echoed off the stone and steel walls. It was chaotic, unregulated—and yet, it functioned.
Kael stopped.
A group of them ran past him, chasing a ball fashioned out of scavenged rubber. A girl tripped, scraped her knee, and burst into tears. Another child—a boy, younger—rushed to her side and hugged her without hesitation.
Kael stared.
There was no prompt. No system of exchange. No hierarchy that required it. No tactical advantage.
They simply acted.
Why?
His mind parsed the moment. Comfort behavior. Emotional response chain. Evolutionary survival instinct, perhaps. But his NNH provided no meaningful answer. It translated the girl's cry as "pain response with fear overlay." The boy's response: "empathetic mimicry."
But none of it made sense.
Children were the only ones he could still understand. Their emotions were simple. When they were sad, they cried. When they were happy, they laughed. They were raw. Honest. Kael remembered being like that. Ten years old. Sitting alone in the remnants of his bunker, crying until the tears ran dry.
He had understood sadness then.
But something had broken in him afterward. Or perhaps something had never formed at all.
Teenagers. Adults. The older they got, the more... layered they became. Emotions wrapped in contradiction, motives buried beneath smiles. They said one thing and meant another. Their pain was quiet. Their joy hesitant. Their rage, irrational.
He tried. He truly did.
The HUD was designed for that purpose—not for war, not originally. It was a translator, a lens to view humanity through logic and structure. He had programmed it himself, line by line, desperate to decode what his mind could not.
He understood fear. Anger. Duty. But not what drove people to choose paths that led to suffering. Why did they cling to hope when the odds were against them? Why did Aera refuse his method, even when it was efficient? Why did she risk lives for the illusion of connection?
Kael moved again, walking slowly past a mother nursing her child. She smiled at him, warm and tired. He nodded back, awkwardly.
Why can't they be like me?
He was fast. Precise. Logical. He didn't hesitate. He didn't need permission to act. Every plan was calculated. Every loss, accounted for.
And yet...
They looked at him with fear. Or reverence. But never understanding.
He reached the edge of the courtyard and paused, gazing up at the clouds beyond the Bastion walls. His HUD flickered again, overlaying troop formations, fuel reserves, communications logs.
He blinked it all away.
I can understand them. But I can't comprehend them.
There was a difference.
And in that difference, Kael felt the one thing he could never measure.
Distance.